Dr KARL SHUKER

Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world. Author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993; greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), The Unexplained (1996), Mysteries of Planet Earth (1999), The Beasts That Hide From Man (2003), and more recently Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), Dragons in Zoology, Cryptozoology, and Culture (2013), A Manifestation of Monsters (2015), Here's Nessie! (2016), and what is already considered to be his magnum opus, Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors (2016), his many fans have been badgering him to join the blogosphere for years. The CFZ Blog Network is proud to have finally persuaded him to do so.

Monday, 28 March 2016

On 20 September 1981, an article penned by George Rosie
on the subject of some very intriguing mystery beasts in miniature that had
lately been filmed in Loch Ness appeared in no less august a publication than
the Sunday Times. During July of that year, Mike Carrie and Jim Hogan
had been scouring the loch bottom seeking the 29-year-old wreck of British
racing driver John Cobb's jet speedboat, Crusader. (Tragically, Cobb had
met his death on the loch after hitting at over 200
mph an unexplained wake - deemed by some to have actually been the
LNM - while attempting to break the world water speed record on 29 September 1952
inCrusader, which had then sunk.)

They had been
using a specialised underwater television camera that amplified light 2,500
times (essential in the peaty waters of Loch Ness) and was from Carrie's own
company, Submersible Television Surveys Ltd. For some time, nothing but barren
mud and rocks could be seen, then suddenly some small white life-forms flitted
into view, which Carrie and Hogan videoed. According to Carrie:

I can best describe then as giant white tadpoles.
They were about two or three inches long, white or pale grey in colour, seemed
to have tails and swam just above the bottom.

Hogan,
conversely, considered that they more closely resembled "wee white
mice" with long tails and legs:

They propelled themselves along the bottom in a jerky
way. We knew what size they were because there was an extension to the camera
to measure them against.

Greatly
intrigued by these highly unexpected and very baffling yet seemingly uncommon
mini-monsterlings (they only saw a handful during 3 weeks of filming), Carrie
and Hogan submitted their videotape of them to Dr P. Humphrey Greenwood, an
ichthyologist at London's Natural History Museum (NHM), for his opinion as to
what they may be. Equally fascinated, Dr Greenwood arranged for some
computer-enhanced outlines of the mystery beasties to be prepared, which in
turn revealed that they seemed to have three pairs of limbs or limb-like
protuberances.

In a letter
dated 18 April 1985 sent to veteran Lake Champlain monster investigator Joseph
W. Zarzynski, who had written to him enquiring about this mystifying species,
Greenwood stated:

On the subject of that object I am certainly prepared
to say that the information on its size, and from what I could determine of its
form and locomotion in the videotape, I would suggest that it was a small
crustacean, and certainly it was no vertebrate animal that I could identify as
being part of the fauna of Loch Ness.

Zarzynski
reproduced the above quote in a short chapter devoted to these entities (and
also to Tullimonstrum – see more about this enigmatic creature here on ShukerNature) in his book Monster
Wrecks from Loch Ness and Lake Champlain (1986).

Additionally,
Rose had noted that Greenwood's best guess was that (in Rose's words): "it
could be some kind of bottom-dwelling crustacean, hitherto unknown in Loch
Ness, similar to some found in other deep-water lakes such as Lake Baikal in
Siberia".

An
amphipod (public domain)

When I read
Rose's account in the Sunday Times, I thought straight away of
amphipods, which are usually very small, superficially shrimp-like crustaceans
represented by both marine and freshwater species. Some of these do have long
tails and are often pale in colour, but they sport more than three pairs of
legs (though some are only very small and slender, and thus may not have been
rendered visible even by the computer-enhancement techniques that the NHM
applied to the Carrie-Hogan videotape). So could these loch-bottom
mini-monsterlings constitute a new species? Quite possibly - but without a
specimen to examine, their taxonomic identity presently remains unresolved.

Interestingly, however,
the latter videotape was not the first evidence for the existence of Loch
Ness's 'white mice' (the name by which these still-unidentified life-forms are
most commonly known nowadays), or at least something like them. As far back as
1972, at around the same time that they obtained their famous underwater 'flipper'
photographs in the loch, longstanding Nessie seeker Dr Robert Rines and his
team from the Academy of Applied Science (AAS) also filmed what may be the same
'white mouse' species, or possibly a smaller, related version, or even a
juvenile version.

A photographic
still from that film, which appeared in the AAS's 1972 publication, Underwater
Search at Loch Ness, depicted a pale mystery monsterling tha was somewhat
bumblebee-like in shape (hence Rines and his team nicknamed such creatures
'bumblebees'). However, it sported a pair of long appendages stretched out
horizontally that made it look surprisingly similar to those familiar
surface-dwelling freshwater hemipteran insects known as water boatmen (genus Corixa)
and backswimmers (genus Notonecta). I am greatly indebted to American
lake monster researcher Scott Mardis for kindly sharing with me several
additional stills from the AAS's 'bumblebee' film, made available in turn to
him by LNM investigator Dick Raynor, which corroborate this mystery creature's
morphology as seen in the photograph contained in the AAS's above-noted 1972
publication.

Scott has
likened the 'bumblebee' form to a veliger (the larva of gastropod molluscs),
whereas Canadian cryptozoologist Sebastian Wang has compared it with tiny
shelled crustaceans known as ostracods, and Loch Ness veteran Adrian Shine has
suggested a cladoceran crustacean (aka water flea) from the genus Bythotrephes.
Some mystery beast investigators have even speculated that perhaps it is a
larval form of Nessie itself, but unless the latter is an invertebrate, as these
'white mice' and 'bumblebees' must surely be, this notion is untenable.

However, such a
huge body mass as possessed by the adult Nessie (judging at least from
eyewitness accounts) would surely require an internal skeleton in order to
support it and give it shape, which thereby argues against an invertebrate
identity for the LNM. This telling point was noted by American college student
Jay Cooney in an interesting article dealing with Loch Ness's monsterlings,
which he uploaded onto his Bizarre Zoology blog on 30 March 2014. (Unfortunately, however, this particular
article later developed image-corruption problems, so Jay subsequently removed
it from his blog.)

Line
diagram of a well-developed veliger (public domain)

'White mice' and
'bumblebees' are not the only unexplained life forms discovered in Loch Ness.
Once again in 1981, but this time in April via a scientific paper written by Dr
T.B. Reynoldson and two fellow University College of North Wales zoologists,
and published in the Journal of Zoology, the remarkable news was made
public that a creature which could legitimately be described as an alien worm
had been discovered here too, and in some numbers. More specifically, it was Phagocata
woodworthi, a species of North American triclad turbellarian flatworm not
native to Europe and never previously recorded from anywhere outside the New
World.

Up to 1.2
in long and 0.2 in wide, dark
grey, brown, or almost black dorsally, paler ventrally, dorsoventrally
flattened, and sporting a truncate head, this out-of-place (o-o-p) invertebrate
(o-o-p species are often referred to loosely as alien species) is known to
attach its cocoons with limpet-like efficiency to the bottoms of maritime
vessels. However, the likelihood that these could remain in situ during an
entire transatlantic crossing seems unlikely – plus, few vessels traversing the
Caledonian Canal have come from America anyway. So how did this species reach
Loch Ness?

A
related species of Phagocata (public domain)

With ultimate
irony, researchers have concluded that the likeliest sources of these worms are
none other than the various monster-hunting vessels that have been transported
down through the years from North America directly to the loch, in particular a
mini-submarine imported here in 1977.

I can well believe an amphipod identity for the 'white mice'. My honours project involved native and introduced *Gammarus* species - the most common creatures that nobody's heard of! The strongest counter to that, IMO, is that the 'white mice' weren't all that common.

I'd love to see the footage and stills of the mice and bumblebees, if they were ever made public.

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